Teaching Kafka

I first met Gregor in Mr. Giordano’s tenth grade English class. Gregor was older than the rest of us, was already working to support his family, and carried a melancholy that covered him like a shroud. Yet, strangely, I found we had much in common. We both were suffering a near paralyzing alienation. We both were anxious about our futures. And Gregor had awoken one morning to find himself transformed into an insect, which meant we had about an equal chance of getting a date on Saturday night.

Many years later, Gregor was one of the obvious inspirations for a novel I wrote called KOCKROACH, the story of a cockroach inhabiting a flea-bag Times Square hotel who wakes one night to find himself transformed into a man. Other inspirations included a Hopper painting, a Louis Armstrong song, an old girlfriend named Gwen, and the kitchen of my East Village apartment. But beyond all those, there was Mr. Giordano himself, the amazing Mr. G.

Along with Gregor, Mr. Giordano introduced us to Gregor’s pal Joseph K., one of those kids who always got called down to the principal’s office for no reason. And Mersault, who sat in the last row of class smoking cigarettes and making time with Marie, while not caring about anyone or anything, certainly not his mother’s funeral. And Roquentin, who had severe gastrointestinal issues. And Job, such a complainer I could barely stand to be in the room with him. And then that big Greek kid, who hung out in the weight room day and night, day and night.

You enter a tenth grade English class expecting to be spoon-fed huge chunks of turgid prose, to read a socially aware novel or two, to maybe tackle a bit of Shakespeare, a little Virginia Wolfe, Dickens, Dickenson, to feel the prick of Richard Wright’s righteous anger. You don’t go into tenth grade English class expecting to get gobsmacked with unsettling questions about the meaning of life. But there was Mr. G, throwing Kafka and Camus at us with a malicious glee.

It’s easy enough to create a brilliant class with amazing authors, but it was the clarity with which Mr. Giordano taught the ideas underlying the books that made all the difference. Behind the characters and stories lay a whole universe of existential thought that Mr. G, through the precision of his understanding and depth of his passion, brought to life for us. We entered that class the callowest of youths; we left it still remarkably, even proudly callow, but with an arrow in our quivers for making some sense of our universe and our lives. It wasn’t the only arrow, there would be many others: God, and politics, and love, and family, not to mention the great triumvirate of sex and drugs and rock and roll. But whenever, even years later, those of us who had the great good fortune to be part of that class began to ponder our fates, Mr. G was always part of the discussion.

To say that Mr. Giordano was the best teacher I ever had doesn’t do his influence on me justice. It would be more accurate to say that he, more than anyone, was responsible for me becoming a writer. It wasn’t that he recognized the worthiness of my prose and encouraged my efforts, because I was an indifferent student and my high school efforts were sadly pathetic. It was more that you left Mr. Giordano’s class with an intuitive understanding of the absolute centrality of art. Literature spoke to the noblest yearnings and deepest doubts, literature was the field where the questions were always more vital than the answers. After a year with Mr. G, where else would I want to play?

I dedicated KOCKROACH to Mr. Giordano and, when I presented him a copy of the novel, I told him he should consider it my tenth grade honors thesis. In a way, I had crammed a little bit of him onto every page. He later called and said he liked the book very much, and I appreciated the kind words, even knowing he was too much of a gentleman to have said anything else. But I can honestly say I wasn’t sitting on tenterhooks waiting for his response. Among the things he taught us was that the opinions of others counted for little in this world; the battle to forge a life and make a contribution was ours alone to wage.

None of us will ever forget the sight of Mr. G in a toga, down on one knee, pushing a mythical rock up that mythical hill while reciting Camus’ immortal lines: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” For a teacher, the struggle to enlighten a pack of unruly teens must have seemed just as Sisyphean. I don’t know if we left Mr. Giordano happy or herniated, but he left us soaring.

Tyler Knox
2008